Category: communication

Are Status Updates Conversations?

I’ve had this link in my “drafts” box for too long, so I want to drag it out and blog it because it raises an important issue. What happens when we trivialize the concepts of “friends,” “conversation” and “community” when we apply them to things that are sort of like friends, conversation and community, but don’t quite cross the threshold. In this image from a recent Forrester blog post, they have added to their original “ladder of participation” (which I find useful, but I cringe at the linearity because I don’t think it is always sequential as shown). What they added was Tweets categorized as conversation. Take a look.

Forrester

Yes, you can have a conversation in Twitter, but I think most Twitter traffic is not conversation. It is a flow of snippets, of 140 character fragments which we can, if we wish, make sense of. We can construct a narrative, but we may not be constructing the intended narrative.

Conversation implies for me turn taking, listening and sensemaking. Status updates… not so much. What do you think?

Related: The Conversation Prism

Tools for Finding Creative Commons Images

Via Michael Guhlin I’m playing with some tools to find creative commons images for use in things like blogposts, slide shows, etc. I thought I’d give Sprixi and FlickrCC.Bluemountains.net–by Peter Shanks, a new year’s test drive. My key word for testing was FREE!

Michael gave a precise review sequence in his blog, so I’ll skipped that and just did a quick “do it now” comparison.

Sprixi – chose the picture, downloaded to my hard drive, then inserted into the blog post.  A black frame with the attribution information is included in the picture. Small to read tho! No link back to the image source.

credited_3063566547_2a11aa6178

On Flickr CC you have a nice editing option, but there are a few more steps to getting the image and the proper attribution into the blog post – you have to do it manually. This is more steps, but more flexibility. Here is the image I chose.

148793655_848ec3073f

And here is the attribution!

Image: ‘Free 2 Run‘
Free 2 Run

Note the copy/pasted attribution does not indicate the CC license but does include a link back to the Flickr picture.

So two tools, two approaches, both useful, but the choice depends on what you are looking for. Bottom line? There are fabulous images out there, waiting to help us communicate better and add beauty to the world, so go out and get them, and thanks to all the photographers who are sharing their images with license forms that allow us to use them. Bravo!